Keeping with my theme of continuing to summarize the data, mostly to reduce work for myself while still keeping some track of what’s going on. My day job is getting busier, I’ll be working with a team that’s on the other side of the planet, so much of my free time in the evenings will turn into work time for the rest of the year. I really don’t know when (or if) I’ll be getting back to game development. On the other hand, it’ll be interesting to see how long I can continue to pull in ~$100/month doing exactly nothing

Ad Revenue

Something happened at Mobclix, but I’m not sure  what. Impressions and clicks are down a bit across both networks, I think this is the start of the usual summer slump. But the Mobclix revenue is way down. Either some of their bigger ad companies pulled out, or… I don’t know. They didn’t even try to respond to my last support ticket asking about payment schedules. Up until a few months ago they were at least trying to make reassurances that developers would get paid. As far as I can tell, Mobclix is finished, at least for smaller developers (I don’t know what’s going on with bigger developers).

AdMob and Mobclix

AppBrain

$18.64

Paid Games

B&N – 27 sales, $18.63

Google – No sales in April, but now I can see the March data – 3 sales, $2.70

Total

The total money that I’ll actually see is AdMob + AppBrain + B&N + Google, which comes to $180.36.

I’m going to switch to more summarized data. My work has gotten really busy over the last couple of months, and it looks like the rest of the year will be the same. So I really doubt I’ll be spending much time working on games. Which is a bit of a shame, I had started working on an idea with a friend that looked promising. Also, I’m not sure Mobclix will ever pay me again, so it seems like a waste of energy to record my earnings with the level of detail I used to.

Ad Revenue

No surprises here, things are pretty stable. Bus Jumper is still getting the most impressions and making the most money. Some days I wonder if I should just write 20 other Bus Jumper clones

Mobclix

AdMob

AppBrain

$22.10

Paid Games

B&N – 54 sales, $37.25

Google – No idea. I’ve been getting a 404 error when I try to access the Play Store developer console

Samsung app store

Bojan asked for data on this. Unfortunately, the data isn’t as exciting as I’d hoped. I suspect Bus Jumper will do better here than Neil Rajah, like it has everywhere else. But right now, I don’t have the time to go through the effort of listing Bus Jumper on the Samsung store.

Neil Rajah had 965 downloads from the Samsung store in March. About 600 of those downloads were in the first 2 days the app was listed (which means they probably have something like a ‘Just In’ listing). After that, it’s settled down to 10-20 downloads a day. That’s about 1/10th the downloads from the Play Store.

February’s numbers are almost identical to January’s.

Ad Revenue

There are still a lot of Bus Jumper installs out there that have the old ads going to Mobclix. About a month ago, Mobclix paid me for June and July, and that’s the last payment I’ve seen from them. For Neil Rajah, the bulk of the downloads are from the Google Play store, so that’s all switched over to AdMob for the banner ads (the 320×250 ‘interstitial’) is still going to Mobclix.

Mobclix

AdMob

AppBrain

$14.39

Bus Jumper – 1102 clicks, 56 installs, $10.03
Neil Rajah – 409 clicks, 45 installs, $4.36

Even with AppBrain, it looks like the geographic stats of Neil Rajah impressions is affecting revenue. The installs-per-click ratio is much better, and the number of installs is similar, but the revenue is a lot lower.

Samsung app store

Next month’s numbers for Neil Rajah should be interesting. It finally got accepted into the Samsung app store on the 3rd submission. I fixed multiple bugs, and filtered the target countries to remove the ones where they objected to Neil Rajah being partially clothed. The app went live on March 7th, and the first couple of days have shown decent downloads, on par with the Play Store (200-300/day). If that holds up, that could double the install base for Neil Rajah, which would be great. We’ll see how that turns out. At some point I also plan to clean up Bus Jumper (remove link to Play Store, etc.) and submit that to Samsung as well.

Paid Games

B&N – 83 sales, $57.26

Google – 2 sales, $1.40

Amazon – I actually got my first payment from Amazon at the end of February, for $10.35. I’m guessing they have a $10 threshold for payouts. I’ve more or less stopped keeping track of sales there, so that was a bit of a surprise. It’s kinda sad that it took me all this while to get to $10 in earnings

So I signed up, submitted the game, and waited. They rejected the game on 31 counts. 30 of those boiled down to 2 bugs that they reproduced across multiple devices. I’ve fixed those bugs. But the final issue was the most interesting one:

Due to the local moral values or laws, content containing partially clothed, bikini or lingerie is not allowed in following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden), Philippines

At first I thought they were complaining about ads, and I figured I’d need to adjust the filters on AdMob. It took me a day to realize that they were complaining about the art of Neil Rajah himself! Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do about that, so I guess Neil Rajah won’t be coming to a Samsung app store near you anytime soon. I’ll probably try Bus Jumper one of these days.

January was my first full month with the ads in Neil Rajah and Bus Jumper switched over to AdMob. As many others have reported, income is lower through AdMob, but I’m hoping the payments will be more predictable. Mobclix finally paid me for June and July of last year, but they’re still a long way from being back at net-90 payment terms.

Ad Revenue

I’ll continue to show AdMob and Mobclix separately for some time.

Mobclix

AdMob

That’s about $335 total, or about half of December. That seems about right for the drop-off after the holiday season.

AppBrain

I released this at the end of January, I have exactly 1 day of data for the month. 12 clicks, 1 install, 19 cents earnings.

Paid Games

B&N - 89 sales, $61.41. This is the first time I’ve checked that store in a month, so that number is actually a pleasant surprise. Only 3 of those sales are for Neil Rajah. I should probably build the B&N version of the current Neil Rajah and publish it so they get the new levels.

Google – 4 sales, $2.81. The usual.